Candy Japan: Huge subscriber growth

Candy Japan is a subscription service for Japanese sweets. In this blog I have been writing openly about the business side of it.

I thought the subscriber growth was nice the last time I posted, but now it is exceeding my expectations. Some bloggers graciously mentioned the service and the story is spreading from blog to blog. Here is the current chart of subscribers.

Where are all these subscribers coming from?

That big spike in the end is mostly thanks to crackajack.de and The Daily What. More and more blogs are mentioning the site and there are also a lot of people sharing it on Facebook. In my previous post I annotated the mentions I got before. Once you get the process going, it is not necessary to contact each author separately, they will read each other's publications and report the same story. I have had this experience before and have heard others like James Hong of HOTorNOT report on this spreading pattern.

As the story about the club is moving directly between blogs, it has even mutated a bit. Some stories are saying that I have moved from Japan, which is not true, I still live in Tokushima. Not that it matters, but it is interesting to think what happens to a message as it is passed on and slightly modified each time.

So far things have proceeded pretty smoothly. I have reports from several subscribers that their packages have arrived intact and without problems. I did have a small problem with an address being printed wrong, because my script was ignoring the second address line. I made that mistake up to the subscriber by sending them a bigger package of candy using a tracked quick shipping method (EMS) as an apology.

Will I be able to handle these orders? Yes, I believe I would be able to handle almost any amount, as I have reserved a sufficient margin to pay for packing help if necessary. It took only 2 hours to mail the ~50 orders I sent out last time. This time it looks like I will be sending out perhaps 150, which should be possible to do in one day even just by myself. To make the task a bit easier, I ordered 1000 pre-printed envelopes from a company in Osaka.

I am incredibly grateful to everyone who has mentioned the service on their sites and at the same time curious to see what happens next. Will I get unlucky and the story will die and be forgotten before being passed on to the next place, or will it continue to spread even further?